CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

eference to Allius’ funeral is pointless and out of place, as his death is announced only in the following line
with mortuus. (Odus has taken fama sepulti from Propertius 2.13.37, which echoes the present passage: see
on line 48 below.)
Fröhlich (1849: 264) based the third supplement on line 151, which he jettisoned along with line 152. In his
reconstruction line 47 follows verse 50, which he writes as in deserto Alli limine opus faciat. The shift from
Alli in the genitive in that verse to him being the implied subject of seruet in this one is awkward; and in any
case it is very hard to believe that an interpolator should have removed a verse from one part of a poem and
based on it a distich of his own that he inserted at a different point within the text. In fact no feature of lines
151f. suggests that they could have been interpolated.
The supplement of Heyse and that of Baehrens (which is printed by Goold in his 1983 edition) are in
reasonable Latin, with minor weaknesses – in the former carmina narrent is unattractive both because of the
construction used (can a carmen be said to recount something in Latin?) and because of its contents (Catullus
sets out to honour Allius with one poem, and not with many), and in the latter the ablative of cause uersibus
… nostris looks suspicious, and once more it is incongruous to read about Allius’ funeral in the supplement
before he is called mortuus, dead, in the next verse. Heyse’s supplement may be the best one on offer, but it
is rather bland, it does not have the dazzling quality of many genuinely Catullan lines.
The sixth supplement is printed by Giovanni Battista Pighi in his 1961 luxury edition of Catullus’ poems. In
his critical notes he attributes it to Pascoli, who is surely the great Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912),
almost as prolific a writer in Latin as in his native language. I have not been able to track down where this
supplement was first published, but there appear to be no other scholars of this name. This supplement starts
with milibus ut facile, which resembles milibus et facite in the previous line; Pascoli seems to have thought
that the line could have fallen out due to haplography. In fact, haplography tends to occur when the eye of a
scribe jumps from the first to the second occurrence of a particular combination of letters; consequently it is
the first rather than the second occurrence that is left out. This is not the case in Pascoli’s supplement, but it
is not unconceivable that in this case a scribe should have copied line 46, mistaken line 47 for what he had
just copied, and continued by copying 48. The supplement itself is attractive apart from milibus … ab ipsis,
which would pick up multis / milibus in lines 45f., but ipsis is harsh (10.9f. nihil neque ipsis / nec
praetoribus esse nec cohorti is only remotely similar, and there too nec ipsis has often been suspected: see
Trappes-Lomax 2007: 53f.), and it would be awkward to limit the thousands of readers mentioned in the
previous pair of lines (multis / milibus) to Allius’ lifetime only. multis / milibus is a generic, collective
expression meaning ‘many thousands of men’, a reference made in passing, as it were, and it is highly
unlikely that it should have subsequently been picked up by the poet.
Like Pascoli, Birt (1904: 428) reasoned that the verse must have fallen out due to haplography, but unlike
Pascoli he thought that the beginning of the lost verse must have resembled the beginning of the one that
followed it, as one would expect in such a case. This accounts for the words notescatque magis; they are
followed by uiuos uolitetque per ora, which is based on Ennius’ topical auto-epitaph frg. uar. 17f. Vahlen
Nemo me lacrimis decoret nec funera fletu / faxit. cur? uolito uiuos per ora uirum. However, the transition
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